Thursday, January 29, 2015

Where I Get My Inspiration for My Custom Made Jewelry

I have been wanting to start talking about other things besides just the books that I love to read and various other bookish related stuff on the blog. It's just my own way of making this blog a little more personal and and a little more me. You may have have seen where I talk about my love of creating jewelry and other things in my blogging goals post for 2014 or in my letter to my future!self that I wrote and posted during last year's Book Blogger LoveAThon.

One of the ways that I help myself destress from all of the crazy things that are going in my life on a day to day basis, is by creating and designing my own custom made jewelry. There's something about it that just relaxes me and I've found that I really enjoy it. I'm constantly getting inspired by different things like books, movies, tv shows, other pieces of jewelry I've seen, and random pieces of art, clothing, etc. It's just so much fun going through all of my beads, charms, and other things and putting something together. I can see the idea beginning to take shape in my mind, then when that usually happens I move onto picking out the colors, the charms, and the type of beads and findings that I want to use to create the piece with.

On a few different occasion's last year, I was involved in a few swaps where we were partnered up with someone else and we created chunky charms that you could dangle off of your purse, bag, etc. There were always a topic, like choose your favorite television show to represent, your favorite book/series, or Parisian theme to name a few of them. I had A LOT of fun doing that and I got some beautiful pieces from my partners as well as got to create some of my own to share with them.

One of the swaps had a challenge where you were partnered up with another person and you were to make a charm bracelet based off of their suggestions and topics, that was a lot of fun for me. I got lucky and was paired with a fantastic lady who allowed me to do pretty much anything that I was inspired by within the limits of the colors and things that she liked. It took me quite a while to put that bracelet together, because I was determined to make it a one of a kind and it turned out more gorgeous than I had anticipated. I enjoyed making it so much, that I ended up throwing in a pair of earrings to match it because I wanted her to have a pair.

Bella: It was so easy for you to leave.Edward: Leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve done in 100 years.

I get my inspiration for the designs that I create from various different places, like places that I've dreamed of traveling to someday, a piece of a fabric, an outfit I recently saw someone wearing, a specific color scheme, a book cover, a character's personality from a television show, and many other avenues that serve as a source for my creative outlet. I love, more than anything, being able to sit down and design something that's really pretty and sharing it with close friends, family, and other's. Sometimes, I give the things that I create out as gifts to friends and loved ones, and sometimes I'm lucky enough to sell them to a few people.

The Twilight Saga

About a couple of months ago, I participated in a one on one swap with a friend of mine, where we decided that we would pick two different themes based on either a television show or books, and our partner (in this case the two of us) would get to choose which one to use and we would create a gorgeous chunky charm based off that idea or inspiration. The two choices that I had given my partner was The Vampire Diaries or Catching Fire and the two that she picked for me to choose from to use as my source of inspiration were,Twilight and Supernatural. For me, this was absolutely a no-brainer, because I immediately chose to use the book and motion picture series Twilight as my inspiration for the chunky charm that I was going to make for her. When preparing to design the chunky charm, I started out by deciding which actual charms I was going to use to represent the books, characters, and the movies, as well as what color scheme I wanted to go with and what types of beads/spacers/caps, etc. that I would be using. The first thing that I did was create a smaller version of the larger chunky charm, so that I could see how it would look scaled down and then I could build off of it from there.

Twilight Forever

There were two of them that I created and I kept the smaller one that I made and packaged up the larger one and sent it to her with the hopes that she would really enjoy the time and the energy that I spent in creating it. I have to say, that I was incredibly surprised and happy with how well it turned out. It was absolutely beautiful, it was the first time that I had made anything that big, chunky, and full of so many beaded and pretty silver metal charms to represent something that I was able to draw so much inspiration from. The color scheme that I had chosen to go with, ended up being a deep rich red, a darker but a little brighter red to represent the heart and passion of the series, along with black and silver to round out the color palette. When shopping for the beads, I decided that I wanted to use a mix of faceted glass crystal beads, gorgeous glass pearls, and other accompanying assorted lampwork and glass beads to round the mix and give it a finished and polished look that would look as if a professional had designed it.

Twilight
Stephenie Meyer

It took a lot of thought and quite a bit of time for me to decide on the silver metal charms that I would be using, to accompany the beaded charms that I created to add to each of the lengths of chain attached to a black bottlecap that I altered with a picture of Edward and Bella on the inside and on the other side, a picture of all of the Cullen clan. The first charm I knew I had to include among the mixture of them was the iconic "apple" that you see represented on the first book in the series, Twilight. Then from there, I spent time picking and choosing various other silver metal charms to represent each book, whether it be a character, an item, or anything in particular that reminded me of important moments in either the books or the movies. There was a larger red crystal cut heart that represented the love and spark of passion between Edward and Bella, a key to represent the key that his family had given them when they gave the cottage to them as their wedding gift, a motorcycle to represent New Moon and the time Bella and Jacob spent together, a wolf to represent Jacob naturally, a feather to represent the feather from the pillow that Edward bit in the beginning of Breaking Dawn, a piece of darker red silk ribbon tied into a bow to represent the torn ribbon on the cover of Eclipse, the third book in the series. Of course, there were other charms here and there that I included as well, that could be found on the charm itself.

Twilight In the Twilight

I enjoyed making that chunky charm so much, that after I had mailed my swap package off to my friend, I decided that I would make another smaller chunky bottlecap charm that was also inspired by Twilight (again using Edward and Bella as my inspiration) to go with the other smaller one that I had previously made as a starting point in this project. This particular smaller chunky charm ended up being done in a more tealish/turquoise and blue color scheme, with bits of silver and white thrown in there for balance. I don't think I use any small silver charms on this one, I just took some of the pretty Jesse James beads and various other faceted glass beads and put them together on a piece of silver chain in little clusters here and there, so that they would dangle prettily when held up or being used as a key chain or attached to a bag or purse. I then attached the chain of bead charm clusters to a silver heavy-weight jump ring that I attached another black bottlecap that I had altered with a picture of Edward and Bella and tied a turquoise piece of ribbon around the top portion of it attaching it to a heart-shaped clasp to dangle from a bag, key ring, or purse, etc.

I will be offering this particular Twilight inspired small chunky charm key chain up for sale, for the asking price of $30. I have priced it that much, to help compensate some of the cost of the beads and the materials to make it, as well as the time that it took for me to put it together. It is very pretty and I know that anyone who is a fan of the series Twilight, whether it be the movies or the books or even both, will definitely enjoy having this custom piece inspired by Edward and Bella. I do have plans, in the near future, to make some more of these smaller chunky key chain charms to represent Jacob and Bella, as well as other characters featured in the series. If you have any requests or any suggestions, please feel free to leave me a comment down below and I'll be happy to respond back to you and work something out. If you would like to purchase this particular small chunky key chain charm, then as I said above, the asking price is $30 and the shipping that I'll be asking for is $3.25.

If you would like a custom small chunky charm key chain where you pick the color scheme, give me the inspiration you would like for me to use, and let me know what kinds of charms you like - then that pricing will start at $35 and higher depending on what options I have available to me in the way of materials and ease of acquiring them.

I hope you have enjoyed this blog post and I hope that you will share word of my blog to your friends, family, fellow bloggers, crafters, and anyone else you think would enjoy it and benefit from it.

3 comments:

I love it when bloggers talk about other things besides books! I didn't know you created jewelry - how cool! And bookish related jewelry too, and partnering with other people to exchange charms!!! SO COOL. Do you do this to go with Book Blitzes? How do you partner with people? As in they've hired you or is it like exchanging with your friends as you've said? I'm curious about this bracelet now. Your Twilight jewelry looks beautiful :).

Oh yes, I love creating my own jewelry, and I love it even more when it's book inspired which means I get to bring two of my loves together. I've been really wanting to make this blog a little bit more personal and so I thought I'd talk about the bookish inspired jewelry that I make from time to time on here, I even have a few more posts and ideas that I'll be talking about here over the next few months.

I've never thought about doing this to go along with book blitzes, but there has been a time or two where I thought about potentially contacting a few of my favorite Indie/Self-Published author's and seeing if they'd like to include something like this in their giveaway or book release blitzes. I may actually see about offering my services for that at some point. As far as the partnering up with people, I had belonged to a couple of different crafting groups and you could sign up for things like charm bracelet/chunky charm/key chain, etc challenges and you get partnered with another person and then you make something for the other person and they make something for you inspired by the challenge itself. Like, I got partnered with a friend of mine to make a beautiful chunky charm and the challenge was based off of either books/tv shows/character and she chose Twilight for what she wanted me to create her a chunky charm of and I chose The Vampire Diaries for me. I'll have to take a picture of the charm she made me and show it to you sometime, it's absolutely gorgeous.

What I'd eventually like to do is be able to sell my bracelets, keychains, chunky charms, earrings, and necklaces. I have even been branching out into making lanyards and also little things to hang from your cars rearview mirror. I also make the little things to hang your glasses around your neck to keep from losing them, those are new though and I'm sort of tweaking them a bit as I go. Pretty much everything I've learned was either self-taught or was learned from a tutorial on Youtube. lol.

I have a bracelet that's very similar to the one that I made that I was talking about here, if you'd like to see it I can show you a picture. I'm wanting to sell it in a set with the earrings that go with it. I was really impressed with how it's turned out.

Aw, thank you, so much for your lovely compliments and your enthusiasm. :)